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GroundTruth Blog

Families across the country are worried about McDonald’s, for more reasons than one. Because McDonald’s is such a huge player in our food system, the decisions the company makes — from marketing, to sourcing, to wages — have a ripple effect. This year, families who are affected by McDonald’s practices are speaking up together as part of a Toxic Taters week of action. The core message? Families deserve better.
At the center of next week’s actions are calls for McDonald’s to reduce pesticide use in fields where potatoes are grown for the company’s “world famous fries” — part of a broader... Read More

A farmer-led coalition in Iowa is celebrating a recent announcement from state officials signaling significant improvements in how agencies respond to crop damage from pesticide drift.
Late last month, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS) revealed their commitment to speed up drift damage testing from over nine months to just under 12 days. This dramatic shift is in response to calls for policy change from a statewide coalition led by farmer organizations, including the Iowa Farmers Union, the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network, Iowa Organic Association,... Read More

This summer, the State Water Resources Control Board announced their plans to get a cancer-causing chemical out of California's water. This is very big news. According to state monitoring data, more than one million Californians may have unknowingly been exposed to the carcinogenic "garbage pesticide" 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP) in their drinking water.
Officials found 1,2,3-TCP in about 100 public water systems; most detections were in the Central Valley, with some in Santa Cruz, Monterey, Sacramento and Los Angeles counties. For people in rural agricultural communities, 1,2,3-TCP exposure... Read More

There have been ups and downs in the romance between Bayer and Monsanto, but this week they publicly announced their engagement. Monsanto has accepted a $66 billion offer from Bayer, heralding another mega merger between pesticide and biotech corporations.
This has already been a big year for consolidation in the agricultural sector, with Dow-DuPont and Syngenta-ChemChina deals well underway. If all mergers go through, just three corporations will control 59 percent of the global seed market and 64 percent of the pesticide market — raising serious concerns about control of food and farming... Read More

Well that took awhile. In early September, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a list of products they will no longer allow in soaps. On that list was the pesticide triclosan — which was identified as a chemical of concern in 1972.
Yep, 44 years. Here's what I wrote back in 2011 when FDA set the process in motion that resulted in this month's announcement:
FDA first flagged concerns about triclosan in consumer products back in 1972. In 1978, they proposed banning the pesticide from hospital scrubs and hand soaps within a couple of years, but for some reason, nothing was done... Read More

Last Friday, a small crowd gathered in the agriculture building at the Minnesota State Fair. Beekeepers, entomologists, reporters, farmers and pollinator advocates circled around a small podium, waiting for Commissioner of Agriculture Dave Frederickson and Governor Mark Dayton to speak. The crowd wasn't disappointed. In a short press conference, Frederickson and Gov. Dayton announced new rules to restrict the use of bee-harming pesticides — and make the state a national leader in protecting pollinators.
The science is clear
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) has been... Read More

Protecting children from pesticides. What could be more straightforward than that? Science clearly shows that children — from the tiniest newborn all the way through high school — are much more vulnerable to the impacts of pesticide exposure than adults. And state data shows that rural California kids are regularly exposed to pesticides drifting from agricultural fields into their schools and daycare centers.
We hope that's about to change. Thanks to all the work that communities across the state have done, the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) is expected to release new rules on the... Read More

PAN stands in solidarity with families that have been impacted by microcephaly and other serious health impacts of the Zika virus. Unfortunately, the primary response to the outbreaks to date has been widespread spraying with pesticides to control mosquito populations. Decades of vector management around the world show that this approach is not only often ineffective, it can also compound the risks to human health.
Zika is a mosquito-borne disease, spread by the daytime biting Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, and outbreaks are occurring throughout Latin and Central America — as... Read More